“It is the June Solstice wherever you go today,” I wrote last week. In the Northern Hemisphere we observe the Summer Solstice and in the Southern Hemisphere the Winter Solstice is observed. Like everything humans do, there is some disagreement about what this means, except that old Sol aligns with the Tropic of Cancer.

I live in Tucson, Arizona, so for me that means that June is the height of the dry Summer. Summer Solstice is definitely the middle of summer in my book. The monsoons usually start in July during which time the humidity spikes while temperatures remain quite high.

This has been an unusual year, weather-wise. Spring often is only evident here by the blooms of plants. Here is southern Arizona we say that, “The ice breaks on the Santa Cruz River” the first day it reaches 100 degrees F. It usually happens in April, but this year it was mid-May before we hit a hundred; it was on May 17th, my birthday, June 17, our wedding anniversary, often records temperatures well over 110 degrees. I do not remember what the temperature was last week on the 17th. That information was lost, completely overwritten, with the slaughter of nine good people at Bible study at Mother Emanuel in Charleston, SC by a hateful, domestic terrorist.

I often wish others, “Happy Solstice.” The main reason I am pleased when Mid-Summer arrives is that the monsoons will soon arrive.

But this year there is a pall over the anniversaries and celestial celebrations that has finally broken through my resolve to exclude sadness from this time of year. I am tired of being parched. It is so dry around here that things can mummify. That can put one in a foul mood. In these days of air conditioners, central air, evaporative cooling, and electric fans it is rather hard to explain why I am living in a hot-house. It is not for the plants. My husband and I are trying to stay on budget and pay off all debt. Obviously to do this we cannot accumulate more debt. So we are limping along with a 20-year-old A/C unit that needs to be replaced. There are parts of our home that will not get below 80 degrees. That makes me a bit irritable too. We will pay cash for a new unit when a tax return is generated for us; did I tell you that some thief filed our taxes for us this year?

With the already evident climatic fluctuations caused by the increase in overall global temperatures, what the future holds for us here is not promising.

Then there is this year’s unsuccessful attempt to push back the memories that come forward every year near the anniversary of my mother’s death. June 25th.

I was to have a Grand Opening for the Women’s Legacy Project on June 25th. But I just could not finish the last bits and pieces of the remaining tasks. Thoughts about religion and racist beliefs have been on my mind constantly these past 10 days and that is not conducive to the concentration needed for a few more launch tasks. Looks like September is the next window for an opening.

Where does protected public expression of your beliefs end and imposition of your beliefs on others begin? It starts way before the killing of 9 good people. I do not say any pledges to flags. I do not support any organized religion. Personal faith is another matter and should be kept personal. But everyone believe they are right. In this area I just do not know, but I do know that freedoms granted by the constitution allow me to do business in public and have my private beliefs.

I will not actively or passively support the public imposition of a religion that was conceptualized at the same time that human sacrifice was practiced. Abraham was going to ritually slaughter his son. Perverse. I am just as suspicious of beliefs related to these practices as I am of any system that has incorporated ritual sacrifice of living creatures. I am extremely uncomfortable with patriarchal, segmentary lineage beliefs and practices that trace to North Africa 5,000 years ago.

Faith is a decision, said Mother Teresa.

Mysticism is “belief that union with or absorption into the Deity or the absolute, or the spiritual apprehension of knowledge inaccessible to the intellect, may be attained through contemplation and self-surrender.”

I have had mystical experiences and from those I have decided to have faith. But I do not want to impose my beliefs on others. That is one of the reasons I like written words so much. We can choose not to read. But please do not expect me to quietly support your ritual practices in my presence unless I have willingly and overtly made a decision to participate in them. Flag flying, a behavior, can be a very dangerous thing. One thing can stand for another. One thing can represent another. One thing often points to other things.

Love and grace are real to me. Everything else is questionable. Even summer and winter depends on where you are standing. I stand firm in my understanding that everything is relative.

I want to write something normal, not something heady, insightful, or politically informed. I don’t want it to be about illness, depression, guns, or require a bunch of research. I have discovered some contentment has slipped in unbeknownst to me during the last couple of decades of life.

In the next week my husband and I will have been married 25 years. Wow. Never thought I would marry, have a kid, be a Girl Scout leader, or teach Sunday School. Life unfolds in unexpected ways.

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Public Smiles

I need to write simple stories about shopping for dinner in Trader Joes with Hubby and asking him to get pre-pared green peas because I still do not like to snap the ends off after entire summers spent shelling peas and snapping beans as a kid. I want to write about the woman with the beautiful white hair who was also choosing vegetables as we were, who broke out in a grin when she heard me say that. She had shelled a fair number of peas from pods in her lifetime. It is nice to make someone smile.

Kisses That Make It Better

I want to write about how happy it made me when my daughter Face-timed me the other day to ask me about a bad cut she’d just sliced into her finger. We discussed stitches, cleaning, wrapping, and other things when I leaned over kissed her finger on the screen and told her it would be all okay. She laughed and said that was exactly what she needed. She is 24 and lives 1500 miles away, but sometimes she still needs Mom to kiss it and make it better.

The Scent of a Memory

I found peonies in the flower section of a grocery a few days ago. It was wonderful. I do not see peonies, lilacs or any of the flowers of my childhood in Arizona, period. Every time I walked by them, I stuck my face into the bouquet and breathed in the silky sweet scent of my grandmother’s garden.

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I cannot wait to do a non-break-neck-edly paced road trip with the Hubby this summer to see sights and wonders neither of us has managed to visit in our multiple scores of years on the planet, and visit our kids and grandkids and finally make it to Niagara Falls. It is good to get out of Arizona in the summer for a while, if you can. This year we can.

Tonight as I write this, I’m enjoying the golden glow of this Honey Moon before the Solstice – and that is enough to fill me with a calm peace.

Sometimes we just need to stop and enjoy the little bits of regular days in a regular old life.

Like this:

Generation Fabulous is both a group of women writers to whom I belong and the web magazine of the same name. The group founder is Chloe, then Anne and Sharon joined with her to create the magazine site. The topic for this month’s Gen Fab Blog Hop is Summer Songs.

Summer songs are songs of the summers of my youth. The earliest Summer Song I can remember was by the Lovin’ Spoonful.

“Hot time. Summer in the city. Back of neck getting dirty and gritty.”

In August 1966 I was 9 years old. “The City” was an exotic concept to my little farm girl mind. This song seemed complex and foreign to me at the time. It was a very grown up song. Why was he in the city? Was he alone? What city? It still makes me smile to connect with a younger version of myself. It also feels good to have a very young part of myself pop up and say hi from time to time.

That essentially is what summer songs really mean to me… they are vehicles to other times and earlier selves.

“I remember when rock was young….” High school for me that was when rock was young. Rock and roll was from a decade or two earlier than that. But rock was from my teen years. Rock differentiated into glam rock, arena rock, hard rock, soft rock, art rock, and religious rock.

The velvety melancholy of Summer Breeze has a haunting quality. I remember my best friend and I being in her bedroom listening to this song, to Cat Stevens album, Tea for the Tillerman, as well as to the James Gang and the Eagles. This is bittersweet. She died at age 21. Those summers I remember with her as a central person were long in a way that can only be appreciated by someone who has grown much older and seen the effect of time passing more and more quickly. I am glad I have in those long, still childlike, memories of laughter and music with her. We thought we were anything but children. “Hummingbird,” the follow-up hit that Seals and Crofts released the next year can bring me to tears in an instant. “Hummingbird, don’t fly away, fly away, don’t fly away…” When I hear it I want to reach back in time and grab my friend in a close, tight hug and tell her not to fly away.

There are more summer music memories. “Summertime and the living is easy…” Gershwin’s lyrics, yes, but it is Billie Holiday’s voice that I hear singing the lyrics in my head,

But “Mungo Jerry” also often pops to mind often when I think of summer songs. And like so many parts of my young there is a tinge of revulsion that comes to the surface if I think about the song. “If her daddy’s rich, take her out for a meal. If her daddy’s poor, just do what you feel.” I still hate that line and how it makes me feel. Back in the back first half of the 1970s in the backwater where I grew up there was a Peyton Place sort of dual nature of the reality. An all white country, probably and “enforced” whiteness by some less than stalwart citizens. Girls were treated quite differently, dependent upon socio-economic status and where their daddy placed in the hierarchy of big frogs in that very small pond,

The different treatment and respect given to women versus men at that time was disgusting but it was everywhere and was the norm. Even the radical groups supposedly working for equality were “run” by the men and the typing and coffee-making was done by women. I know a couple of women who are my age who were predated upon by men in positions of power at the high school we attended. Is it any wonder that the boys our own age felt it was acceptable to harass and abuse us girls? Cultural signals that it was okay to treat women terribly and treat socially vulnerable girls even worse were everywhere in local, national, and even international culture. “If her daddy is poor… just do what you feel.” Much later in life I discovered that 1975 had some great non-pop, non-rock music going on.

Kool and the Gang, Summer Madness, comes to mind. If only all of the world could have been so smooth and sophisticated.

I used to have, as did some friends, a page from ZAP Comix, Mr. Natural by R. Crumb, hanging next to my kitchen sink. It started out with Mr. Natural with a thought bubble that said, “Bitch, Gripe, Moan!” or something to that effect as he started to wash a huge pile of dirty dishes in a sink. The panels progress with Mr. Natural getting more and more into the task, whistling and the like and then the last panel shows the dishes gleaming and Mr. Natural saying, “Another job well done!”

R. Crumb did not copyright his work in Zap Comix. There was a collective belief in the non-ownership of property in the idealistic 70s. Unfortunately this was before Creative Commons licensing, but not before corporate greed. Always give credit where credit is due.

That’s how today was, except that I never got beyond the second panel or so. I did the dishes but I’m not whistling. I walked my Daisy Dog, given name Daisy Buchanan, after dark this evening and the sweat still dripped down my neck because in Tucson in June it can be between 95 and 100 degrees after dark.

I love Tucson at one level, but 20 plus Junes in Tucson feel like enough at times. The day we married in June of 1989, it hit 117 in Tucson. It is not that hot this year, but I am still grumpy. It is too hot to be outside. At least I don’t live near Sierra Vista, Southeast of Tucson, where their water supply has been vandalized by someone who shot holes in the holding tank. Some homes have low pressure and some have no water what so ever. Screwing with a water supply used to be the kind of thing that you would get you shot out here in the desert West.

I have a bit of a headache that could be from a stiff neck that I think is related to the insistence of one of my cats, Itty Bitty Gray Kitty, on curling up in my hair and sleeping on top of my head after I fall asleep.

Itty Bitty Gray Kitty getting ready for a nap in her favorite place in the whole world, my hair!

The sub-tropical world.

Or it could be from the air being so dry. I really, really want it to rain this weekend. I want the monsoons to start! I thought they would be building up after last weekend’s rain, but heat – rain – heat – rain cycle that builds the monsoon just hasn’t kicked in yet. Yes, we really have Monsoon rains in the Southwest. We are sub-tropical. So, please, don’t ever use the phrase, “It’s a dry heat” around an Arizonan. It would sort of be like going to NYC and saying, “Look at all the tall buildings.”

Actually Arizona is heating up more than many other places, according to recent reports of actual temperatures. Not all states are heating up equally, per climate change. According to MSNBC, “The state that saw the highest temperature increase was Rhode Island, followed by Massachusetts, New Jersey, Arizona and Maine”

Like this:

Huh? Well first let me make one or two things perfectly clear. I am not an archaeologist nor am I a Pagan. But I am a woman, so I pay attention to cycles and circles.

My iCal app popped up today, reminding me it is Litha, the Summer Solstice. I set the calendar reminder to nudge myself into having some good Midsummer Night’s dreams, to think of the wonder that is Stone Henge, to marvel at all that has come before, and mostly to annoy some of my friends with more traditionally structured thinking than me by mentioning a, GASP, Pagan Holiday! And I am a rather nontraditional thinker. I was just discussing “thinking outside the box” with my therapist. I came to the realization that I have never had a thought that was inside the box. Or if I did have one it has long since slithered away.

In fact, one of the first dreams I ever remember having was about boxes. This is my story; if you steal it, I will hurt you. The subject was Jack-in-the-Boxes to be specific. In the dream I was a little boy, sort of cartoonish looking, so I presume I saw a cartoon from which I extrapolated. I had black hair, a round face, was wearing a sombrero, a red shirt and blue pants. I was sitting, legs straight out in front of me, at the top of the steep bank of the hill to the North of my house. To my left was a Jack-in-the-box. The dream wasn’t about the surprise of the “pop” or the scary jester face. The Jack had already popped up, and I was looking inside the box where I saw a miniature version of the scene I was in, a little boy dressed as I was, sitting on a hill, and he was looking into a Jack-in-the-box. I remember the “Ut Oh” experience I felt in the dream as I was looking in on the tiny, recursive world and realized that I had to look up into the sky. It was both sort of dreadful and sort of exhilarating as I tilted my head back and saw the outline of fracture in the sky where a lid was opening and I could see the eyes of a little boy who looked just like me as he opened a lid into my world.

This memory means so many things to me. It is an icon in and of itself, to me, but it also signifies many aspects of my self, and is a symbol for each of those aspects. (That was your semiotics lesson for the day. LOL.) And as I said, when I think about “thinking outside of the box” I realize my thoughts have never been inside the box. This dream was profound and made a lasting impression on me, obviously, but until extremely recently, I had not conceptualized at a conscious, verbal level of how it illustrates how differently I think literally outside the box, and with recursion. I don’t think most pre-schoolers have dreams like this, or if they do, they don’t remember them, or share them. I remember things back to an extremely early point in my life. I have strong, vivid imagery that accompany most of my thoughts.

So what does this all have to do with Litha and Lithics? Keep reading. Because my mind seems to employ some sort of fractal pattern in storing and recalling memories, I see patterns throughout the world around me. The books of Gregory Bateson and Douglas Hoefstaedler come to mind as good ways to tap into the pattern that connects seemingly disparate parts of our lives, such as mathematics, art and music.

The evidence of thought does not fossilize, nor does it preserve itself in stone. We have the internet connecting us, now, but it does not fossilize either. The ancients with their lithic reflections of their thoughts and beliefs better capture their understanding of the universe for the ages than we do with our World Trade Towers that we have seen fit to turn to rubble. This day, this now, this Midsummer day and night of wonder, is a day we choose to conceptualize as recurring every 365 days or so. I choose to have this day be a point of reflection for what has been and what will be. Yesterday, the days were getting longer. Today, the days are getting shorter.

Enjoy the day, no matter what you do or how you think. Namaste, my friends.

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About Me

I have written and published many blogs over the last 15 years on the topics of Later Born Baby Boomers, Peace & Justice Activism, Virtual Worlds, Gene Stratton-Porter, and Medical Child Abuse. I love research, information and the quest for knowledge. I'm an anthropologist by training, and a freelance content creator by vocation. I love things that make sense, could be, and might be so I enjoy good speculative fiction along the lines of Cory Doctorow and TV shows like Dr. Who and Orphan Black.